Skitarii Battle-Pilgryms of the Horus Heresy (Warhammer 40,000 Lore)

Within a common understanding of the word duty, many will find meaning. The commitment to an ideal higher than the self is an admirable thing to be sure, driving one forward where material circumstances may argue otherwise. Most will speak of duty as a voluntary thing, an interplay between one's responsibilities and obligations, but inherently one's belief in the state, the cause, the religion, or whatever else one has pledged oneself to. >> [music] >> When duty becomes a core part of the self through means inherent, say for example, techno-organic programming and grammatical shackles, can it truly be called duty in the sense that we commonly understand it? I shall leave such debates to minds greater than my own and concern myself with the facts at hand. For the subject of this record, were defined by a duty inviolate, utterly loyal to the cause they served, and therein lies a tale most fascinating. And know then that this is a record of the Technologist Pilgrims, the Red Hand of Mars, and the right hand of the Fabricator General, the Skitarii of the Horus Heresy. The first Skitarii conclaves were formed on Mars during the long and terrible millennia of the Age of Strife. The red planet's fall during that benighted epoch had been especially severe. Having been terraformed many millennia before, indeed being the first human world to have been so uplifted, its climate proved more fragile than many could have anticipated. As the empire it had created was gradually and then suddenly severed from reach, supply chains dwindled, in turn affecting everything from food production to industrial output, and yes, technological stability. Mars's ecological and climate stabilization systems failed spectacularly, annihilating a planetary biosphere that had taken tens of thousands of years and immeasurable human effort to create and sustain. The Mars of old returned, a dust-choked, irradiated wasteland scoured by solar winds, roamed now by desperate hordes vying for their very survival. But things more terrible still. Mars's societal and ecological collapse, along with the rampant artificial intelligences that had savaged it so terribly during the Machine Wars, had created strains of mendicant technological abominations that menaced its surviving human population. Most prominent in surviving historical record are mentions of the so-called Sai Carnivora. And while we have little in the way of descriptions of them, it appears they acted as essentially apex predators, slaughtering bands of terrified humans for nothing other than seemingly insatiable malice. Their code engrams corrupted alongside the red planet's fall. In these dark millennia, many thousands of years before the first tech-priests of the Cult Mechanicus began preaching the word of the Machine God and his Omnissiah, the Skitarii conclaves were first created. To survive the depredations of the wasteland and the machine horrors that stalked them, the humanity of Mars was forced to adapt. Technology and devices that had survived society's collapse became prized above all else, especially if they could continue to function in the new reality that was the Age of Strife. The hunt for such technology became critical to a clan's continued existence, despite the risks such treasure seeking inevitably brought. The most prosperous clan bands survived the wastes with a mixture of tenacity, cunning, and sheer speed. A straight fight with attack abominations that stalked the red sands was rarely a better idea than simply out pacing them. Artifact hunting was a way of life on Mars for many millennia, developing a culture that revered technology, if not religiously, then as a fulcrum around which kin groups could eke out a meager to modestly prosperous existence. During this era, cybernetic augmetics were covered that allowed the warriors of these clans to enhance themselves, becoming long of limb to better outrun their predators, shield their human organs against radiation cascades, and even retain and exploit the precious knowledge and skills that kept their kindred safe. These were the first Skitarii, warriors of the techno clans, seekers of lost knowledge, migrant scavengers abroad across a dead world. Over time, the augmetics of these clans gradually developed into what history knows as the Corpus Skitarii, a collective term for the cybernetic enhancements that transformed their bodies from baseline humans into cyborg warriors. Over time, the process developed from robust practicality into a hollowed tradition amongst the first Skitarii conclaves, primarily due to its extremely painful and invasive nature. Initially, these aspirants were submitted to the conclave for augmentation, willfully volunteering to undergo the flesh shriving that they may become a warrior to protect their kin. Though there were exceptions, almost all have their arms and legs replaced by augmetics, while a significant amount of their internal organs are likewise replaced by cybernetic equivalents. It is said the first conclaves used the very rocks and sands of Mars to grind their limbs to stumps while awaiting machine grafts. And while this cannot be independently verified, it is widely known that the flesh shriving is as excruciatingly painful as its name implies. At a certain point in the process, however, the warrior is largely freed from this pain. The augmetics implanted into their brain beginning to rewire their human matter with the touch of the machine. This burgeoning network of neural links possess within them the distilled knowledge and experience of all their conclave brethren that came before and fell in battle. This form of psycho-indoctrination was foundational to the conclave's early survival, for it allowed for the preservation of that most precious resource of all, their knowledge base. It allows even the most callow youth to become a lethal warrior within an extremely short amount of time, with their new augmetic bodies providing them enhanced strength and durability besides, capable of surviving wounds that would destroy a baseline human. Their individual self is, of course, long gone. They are now subsumed within a primitive gestalt, their predecessors speaking to them through skills and knowledge, themselves networked to others within their conclave, reborn fully as Skitarii. With the coming of the worship of the Machine God and the eventual rise of the Mechanicum of Mars, the Skitarii conclaves became natural early allies for the tech-priests of the Deus Mechanicus. Millennia of skills combating the worst abominations of the wastelands made them valuable military assets, while their technological base was a highly sought-after addition to the Mechanicum's burgeoning polity. They were, indeed, culturally aligned. Millennia of seeking out the lost treasures of Mars's ancient past had already instilled within the conclaves a near-religious devotion for technology, and the overwhelming majority of the kin-bands were eager and zealous converts. Indeed, the artifacts in their possession were critical in the foundation of the Mechanicum's industrial base, aiding those first production lines, habitation constructs, and agricultural settlements. For this, they were honored by the very first Fabricator General with induction into their personal service. During the centuries prior to the Treaty of Olympus, the Skitarii conclaves underwent massive expansion under the direct patronage of the Fabricator General. No longer required to raise members of isolated clans for their numbers, each conclave was assigned a forge domain from which to levy the indentured workers subservient to said forges. They rapidly became a truly fearsome military arm of the Mechanicum, one that, quite crucially, was removed from adherence to the Byzantine feudal web of compacts, alliances, and treaties that formed the means through which the Mechanicum's tagmata would normally be raised. Under the laws governing the tagmata, each tech-priest, militant cult, or forge feign negotiated their own standing commitment of soldiery, equipment, vehicles, automata, and all other potential elements. A system that, while capable of levying the very best the Mechanicum could offer, was deeply complex and quite prone to political manipulation and disruptive factors. Skitarii Alpha Conclaves were held apart from this, instead being under the personal jurisdiction of the incumbent Fabricator General, wholly beholden to their orders and thus their personal agenda, in addition to the significant military might the Fabricator General's forge no doubt already afforded them. Nominally, this was done in the name of serving the Mechanicum at large, as was indeed, of course, the Fabricator General's role. Thus, the Conclaves' deployment carried with it no small element of political optics. In large part, however, successive Fabricators General wielded them in line with their stated mission to seek out lost technology, continuing the culture of the original migrant clans, but now at a wholly new scale. Accordingly, the expansion of the Conclaves developed them into focused, self-sufficient armies that, even before the advent of the Great Crusade, were capable of operating far from Mars with limited to no support from the Red Planet. Even before the warp storms that defined the Age of Strife had fully abated, Conclave elements were dispatched beyond the light of Sol to search for ancient technology amongst the roiling shadows of a hungry galaxy. Although it is difficult to verify if any of these quests were in fact successful. What is certain, however, is that with the signing of the Treaty of Olympus between the Imperium of Terra and the Mechanicum of Mars, Skitarii Conclaves were dispatched anew into the void. Sometimes as militant arms of the Basilicon Astra, sometimes with Taghmata of Mars, and sometimes entirely unsupported. But all with the same ultimate goal, recovery and preservation of technology once lost to humanity in the name of the God of the Machine and his sacred quest for knowledge. Each Conclave developed and maintained its own specialties, strategies, and traditions for their hunts. But one commonality shared between them was that despite their skills in combat, none were trained or inducted into the mysteries of the actual use of the devices they recovered. They could not, nor by the dictats of the Fabricator General, ever seek to wield what they had discovered. Merely ensure its preservation and swift return to Mars or one of her allied forges. A great many of these were stored within the massive archival vaults of the Martian moon of Phobos under the watchful guard of the First Conclave. Again, these artifacts were under the personal control of the Fabricator General as they had all been ruled too precious, too fragile, or too dangerous to ever be removed. Likewise limiting the Skitarii Conclaves was their access to arms and armaments beyond their own personally wielded war gear. The first tribes possessed the robust scavenger mentality and environment that in many ways locked them to a specific style of warfare, namely light infantry engagements with portable weapons that prioritized a combination of stopping power, utility of movement, and ease of maintenance. In this, the first Fabricator General did little to change. The Skitarii battle pilgrims of the Great Crusade and laterally the Horus Heresy existed in much the same form as their ancestors of the Age of Strife had. The Corpus Skitarii granting them elongated legs for rapid battlefield traversal and opportunistic hit-and-run tactics. While their refined volt-lock variants of Martian volkite heat ray weapons proved a perfect degree of killing power and ease of field maintenance. Their dedication to their craft and the code dictats under which they lived within their mangled neurology developed exceptional skills and abilities, but with a very narrow specialization. They were fundamentally incapable of performing any roles other than the ones they occupied. The conclaves were responsible for the forging of their own war gear and permitted to use no others. This often rendered them dependent on the goodwill of other forges and tagmata in their search for artifacts. A very deliberate measure designed to curtail the ability of the Fabricator General to possess a powerful and capable personal army. Binding the quest of the Skitarii to the service of the Mechanicum as a whole and forcing cooperation between the factious followers of the Machine God. Given that each conclave nominally spoke with the word of the Fabricator General, it is perhaps reasonable for acolytes to assume they could simply demand supply and support from client forge worlds or tagmata. In reality, this was never the case. The lords of the mechanicum exercised significant authority within their domains, far eclipsing their analogs within the Imperium. Any support to be extracted from them was to be provided only through significant negotiations. A skitarii force, however, had much to offer a forge world. Alliances of both convenience and long-standing could readily be struck, providing the skitarii with armored fighting vehicles and automata maniples, as well as sundry other tagma, in exchange for the conclave service. In the case of fighting vehicles, for example, a conclave could sometimes amass many that would become permanent additions to their roster, while others merely incorporated them into deployments for the duration of specific campaigns. All skitarii conclaves were commanded by the arch ordinator, an officer answerable directly to the fabricator general. These individuals are acknowledged to be specifically skilled and experienced warriors, bereft of ego and utterly committed to the betterment of the conclaves and the success of all skitarii missions. A conclave was then subdivided into themata, numbering 16 in a standard conclave. Collective themata were then divided between locos 1 through 22, then into corpii of 12 skitarii each, roughly analogous to a squad formation within the legion as a starties or Imperial Army. In the field, the most senior officer to a detachment, no matter the size, would be then appointed the brevet rank of skitarii marshal, a temporary position of overall battlefield or campaign command that leveraged the skills of the warrior but did not continually place them above their fellows. Likewise, each corpus of cyborgs would be commanded by an ordinator similarly appointed through seniority alone. Such an almost ad hoc command structure was only made possible through the network gestalt quality of the Skitarii themselves. The knowledge retaining engrams of their corpii Skitarii allowing for such things to be possible. They cared nothing for the pursuit of rank or privilege, merely the success of an individual mission. Ego is thus never a consideration within Skitarii conclaves. It made them superlatively dedicated and razor focused to their goals but also rigidly hidebound. In certain cases, conclaves would be followed by hosts of Osteolaejoy known amongst the Mechanicum at large as bone pickers. Essentially vagabond religious pilgrims these bizarre unaugmented humans would comb through the detritus of the battles fought by the Skitarii. In their eyes, painstakingly salvaging the remnants of a just holy war fought by the cybernetic soldiery they so adored. To such wretches, even something as mundane as spent shell casings possessed the quality of a low-grade relic for it had been in contact with and utilized by higher forms of technology. For the twinned divine purpose of the retrieval of technology >> [music] >> and the persecution of the machine god's enemies. Bone picker formations were thus never coherent in their numbers or scale nor incorporated officially into a conclave's standard line of battle. They could, however, readily be used as human shields. One whose religious fervor meant they would never disobey an order from a Skitarii marshal if such chose to gave one. By the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, there were some 30 Skitarii conclaves operating at the behest of Fabricator General Kelbor-Hal. The Schism of Mars was as catastrophic to the conclaves as it was for the Mechanicum as a whole. And while one's acolytes may presume that their programmed loyalty to the Cies of Olympus Mons would have seen the Skitarii in their totality follow Hal into traitorous damnation. This was not the case. When the Fabricator General broke the seals on the vaults of Moravec, releasing the cursed scrap code upon the red planet, and precipitating what history now knows as the death of innocence, he counted upon the unbreakable loyalty of the Skitarii to enact far more precise destruction. And indeed, many of them did just so. Six hours prior to the opening of the vaults, Kelbor-Hal transmitted General Order Omega 99 to all Ordinatus Prime in encoded bynaric, instructing their deployment against forges and magi he knew would never follow him. Or those against which he held a special malice. This preliminary phase of the death of innocence saw Skitarii conclaves loyal to Olympus Mons strike clandestinely at the Fabricator General's enemies, conducting savage and professional sabotage or obliteration operations. In some cases, unleashing some of Kelbor-Hal's most destructive Dark Age of Technology devices and weapons. The bynaric was clear. The Skitarii served the Fabricator General, and the Fabricator General served the Mechanicum. Yet, within this logical paradigm, the root of Skitarii loyalty to the birth of the Mechanicum itself was the understanding that the conclaves, too, served the Mechanicum. For the Fabricator General was the embodiment of the Machine God's servant given immortal vessel. None had ever attacked the Mechanicum as a whole. Of course, there had been internal feuds in the past, internecine spats between forges, but no civil conflict had in centuries been conducted on anything approaching the scale of destruction that the death of innocents had unleashed. Such an act of monstrous annihilation could not, by the evidence of the Skitarii's own oculars, possibly serve the interests of the Mechanicum. And thus, Kelbor-Hal could no longer be the Fabricator General. The transmissions of Archmagos Zagreus Kane, claiming the authority he asserted was forfeited by Kelbor-Hal, provided these loyal Skitarii a new Fabricator General to serve. For the incumbent had renounced his authority in a tidal wave of nuclear fire. Worse yet, this destruction was clearly being aided by in part by relics from the vaults of Phobos, relics the Skitarii conclaves themselves had placed there for safekeeping, further destroying their legacy and the commitment to the Mechanicum's ideals Kelbor-Hal was supposed to have safeguarded. Seeing this opposition move like lightning through the gestalts of the conclaves, Kelbor-Hal realized his error and that he could not count upon the fulsome loyalty of his Skitarii. Moving quickly, he injected a scrapcode infection into the conclaves networks, hard re-wiring their command protocols with malefic binary, but the damage had already been done. Fully 1/3 of the conclaves had severed their links to the Olympus Mons network, removing them from the control of the Fabricator General and reassigning their loyalty to the word of Fabricator Locum Zagrius Kane. The first act of a contingent of these loyalists, even as billions of Martians perished around them in the throes of the death of innocents, was to launch an attack on Phobos. Some 12 hours into the fall of Mars, Conclave Incursus Lambda Psi affected a landing on the moon. Its guards wholly unaware that their loyalty no longer was within the reach of Kelbor-Hal. Some 3,000 Skitarii aboard a squadron of shuttle craft breached the hangar's defenses, fighting a distraction assault that allowed smaller teams of infiltrators to reach their main objective, the archival vaults. Skitarii warriors clashed with each other for the first time in Imperial history. It is recorded that in one fateful instance, two marshals in command exchanged binary blerts, each attempting to ascertain the meaning behind the other one's logic of loyalty. The debate lasted approximately 8.2 seconds thanks to the depth of information contained within Mechanicum code blerts, but it was for naught. Neither could see the other's perspective. The slaughter broke out once again, ensavaging both garrison Skitarii and attacking loyalists. The infiltrators succeeded where the distraction force was slaughtered. The remains of the attacking conclave bore away from Phobos a relic of astonishing providence, the sarcophagus of the very first Fabricator General. While there was no doubt far more powerful weapons and devices within the vaults, the sarcophagus, when borne to Fabricator Locum Kane's forge, was instrumental in providing him with the authority, political and religious both, to establish himself as a true and loyal Fabricator General. As the Heresy progressed, the debasement and corruption commonly visible amongst traitor forces eventually took hold amongst the Skitarii I conclaves loyal to Kelbor-Hal. The first symptoms were clearly visible as early as the Death of Innocence. Infected by scrap code, the logic processors of those first fallen were corrupted by baleful influences. Rewritten to not only obey the word of Hal, but also the secret song that underwrote the universe. These were the first Skitarii I to daub their robes with the blood of their enemies. An act so curiously barbarian that it was remarked upon even by tech-priests newly come to Hal's so-called true Mechanicum. This aberrant behavior would only worsen as the years of the civil war wore onwards. With Skitarii I traitors engaging in increasingly bloodthirsty displays that ill became their once professional conduct. It did not lessen their capabilities, of course. In many cases, the hunger for bloodletting and violence made them better warriors. Any attendant Magi either turning a blind eye to this or openly reveling in the grotesquery, according to their own degrees of corruptive debasement. Kelbor-Hal made extensive use of these conclaves as both enforcers and shock troops. The latter against loyalists, and the former against any fractious Magi he was nominally considering as allies. >> [music] >> They were frequently dispatched to traitor forge worlds that had failed to meet the demands of the Fabricator General or did not show a due degree of supplication to the Warmaster. No few Archmagi found in dereliction of their commitments were brutally killed by Skitarii, earning the cyborgs the informal term the Red Hand of Mars amongst the true Mechanicum as a whole. Some conclaves were placed upon loan to Horus Lupercal, the traitor primarchs or other traitor forces. As the hunger for lost technology that may provide them some degree of edge in the conflict was very much present across the entire sweep of the Lost and the Damned. Many of the heresy's greatest atrocities could only have been committed thanks to the recovery of terrible weapons, some of which indeed were of xenos origin, by fallen Skitarii. With the conclusion of the Siege of Terra and the fall of the Warmaster, the Skitarii conclaves were reformed under the new Adeptus Mechanicus as part of the sweeping reorganizations of that institution undertaken during the scouring. In their present form to this day, Skitarii legions are a far cry in both presentation and formation than their archaic ancestors. Sworn to serve the Archmagi of individual forge worlds, not the Fabricator General. While still wholly dedicated to the Mechanicus' quest for knowledge, they are no longer the mendicant conclaves of old, but more akin to standing armies of the forge. The treasure hunts of the Great Crusade now being the responsibility of all the machine god's servants, not merely the Skitarii. They are no longer long of limb, but typically take a more humanoid form. Although it must be noted that some Skitarii legions adopt vastly different forms and cultures. In truth, the heresy transformed the Skitarii in ways it did so many other human cultures and formations. Those of old and simply no longer are. Their traditions lost to the fires of an ambition that tore the galaxy asunder. So many such cases stain our history that it drives one to great sorrow. And I must commit myself to rest. Until such a time as I may elucidate you once more. Ave Imperator. Gloria in excelsis terra. This video and this channel were made possible thanks to the very kind donations and support from my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com/oculusimperia. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at Oculus Imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching. >> [music] [music] >> Amen. >> [music] [music] >> Amen. >> [music] [music] >> Amen. >> [music] >> Amen. >> [music] [music] >> Amen. Amen. >> [music] >> Amen. >> [singing] [music] >> Amen. Amen.